Policies favoring welfare over work are not answers for ending poverty

The American policy debate is undergoing an important change. Some influential Democrats no longer view welfare benefits as “work supports” as they have done for the past generation. Instead, they increasingly see welfare benefits as ends in themselves, regardless of whether recipients work consistently or even work at all to receive them. Meanwhile, the list of benefits that prominent Democrats think that government should provide, from payouts resembling “universal basic income” and “carbon dividends” to free college tuition and free health care, is growing rapidly.

This twin shift reflects a rejection of the longstanding Democratic position on welfare reform and the biggest proposed expansion of the welfare state since at least the Great Society. With the likely 2020 Democratic presidential candidates pushing many of the plans, they will be debated and possibly enacted in the years ahead. The most dramatic departure from work support logic involves universal basic income. A recent study noted a primary feature of universal basic income is that it “provides a sufficiently generous cash benefit to live on without other earnings.”

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Inspired by fears of a dystopian future in which low wage jobs are replaced by technology, the thinking among Democrats seems to be that if there is no work, there is no point in expecting people to work for benefits. While some have cast universal basic income as replacing current welfare benefits, the new payments under discussion would be on top of Medicaid, housing, tax credits, food stamps, and other benefits for people with low earnings, piling onto the benefits that adults stand to lose if they work and earn more. Of course, fewer will do so.

These federal programs would involve huge wealth transfers and are hardly targeted to restoring and strengthening the middle class. The Harris plan, for example, would most heavily subsidize limited part time work, not the kind that can actually lift families out of poverty. One supporter rightly dubbed it “a kind of optional” universal basic income.

These sorts of massive benefit increases stand in contrast with the past two decades, when many liberals touted expansions of food stamps and Medicaid as “work supports” needed to increase work and earnings to help families escape poverty. That “work supports” rhetoric seems long gone among Democrats, as most of the left has dug in its heels against extending work requirements to benefits like food stamps and Medicaid.

This latest turn hearkens back to the 1980s, when liberals resisted work requirements for welfare recipients, deriding them as making recipients “sing for their supper.” In 1996, following the lead of President Clinton, more than half of Democrats in Congress rejected that view and joined nearly all Republicans in supporting the “work first” welfare reform law. This resulted in less poverty and welfare dependence precisely because it successfully promoted more work and earnings by low income parents.

Rejecting that approach now in the name of liberating the poor from work will not liberate anyone. It will only harm the very people policymakers are claiming to help by making it harder for them to escape poverty for good.

Matt Weidinger served for more than two decades as a staff member of the House Ways and Means Committee. He now works as a resident fellow in poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute based in Washington.